The Abilities of the Human Brain - Psychologist Michael Shermer

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Optimism and hope for the best can lead to positive changes in a person's life, while a pessimistic attitude, on the contrary, can cause failure. Such an opinion in the program “SophieCo. Visionaries,”said psychologist and founder of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer.

According to him, people who consider themselves lucky are more sociable and open to new experiences, so something good can happen in their lives more likely. In an interview with RT, Shermer also speculated about the origin of emotions, the capabilities of the human brain, the nature of scientific progress, and the mystery of dreams.

You say that people have an innate ability to believe in the incredible. Can we say that illusions are a mechanism that nature has provided for us so that we can survive and be happy?

- Beliefs are born in us naturally. This is called associative learning. It helps to establish relationships in the environment and understand cause and effect relationships. Imagine that you are a hominid living 3 million years ago and you hear a rustle. You guessed that this sound was caused by the beast, but it was only the wind. You made a mistake, tried to find a connection where there is none. It didn't do any harm since you ran away. However, if you thought that the rustle was caused by the wind, and it was a predator? You have been eaten, your genes have disappeared from the gene pool. So in the course of evolution we have developed the ability to believe in doubtful things. This kind of belief is called superstition or magical thinking, and it is not a flaw.

Can we say that emotions will always prevail over our mind?

- Right. The point is that we combine the rational and the emotional. Reason is a tool with which we try to understand how the world works, and emotions are a way to quickly come to conclusions. Evolution has created emotions to induce action. You don't need to calculate the number of calories per day - you just feel hungry.

Or take attraction to another person: this is how evolution helps a species to continue to exist. Anger, jealousy, and other intense feelings provide an intuitive feeling and quick cognition about other people or situations. Often, bad feelings are supported by facts and reflect reality quite accurately. This is a useful ability.

And what is, in fact, reality? Many famous physicists say that it might just be an illusion

- I do not think that this statement is true for the world in which we live - for the physical world at the macro level. Scientists who say that are in quantum physics, subatomic particles. The atom itself is mostly empty space. Therefore, some modern gurus may say, "This chair is emptiness." At the macro level, the atoms are closely linked, and the chair on which I sit is quite a solid, solid thing, otherwise I would have fallen to the floor. There are objects in the world, such as walls, that we have to take into account when we move. Our senses allow us to determine that this is not an illusion, but a reality.

But the most perfect tool for comprehending the true appearance of the world is science. After all, individually, each of us can be mistaken, distort something or experience illusions. But on a collective level, we are able to form a completely accurate picture of the world.

Does creativity affect our ability to believe in anything? Is it true that imaginative people are more likely to believe in all sorts of strange things?

- I think there is some correlation here. Some people are open to new theories and they can establish relationships across disciplines. Among other things, truly smart people believe in strange things.

For instance?

- Well, let's say, in conspiracy theory regarding the events of September 11, 2001. Or that astrology works, but extrasensory perception really exists. As a result, thanks to their openness and creativity, people can believe in the reality of things, not all of which are real! It is important that these qualities do not lead to belief in all the crazy ideas in a row. So being creative and innovative doesn't mean you're right and should be a Nobel Prize winner. Most of the new theories are wrong, even if their authors are professional scientists.

There is an opinion that the scientific revolution is preceded by pseudoscientific research, attempts to fill in the gaps in the picture of the world. And all this work ultimately leads to the so-called paradigm shift. If we think from this point of view, are we not on the verge of another scientific revolution?

- There is a certain set of ideas with which the majority of those working in this area agree. But around this paradigm are anomalies that do not fit into it. And when such anomalies accumulate enough, a new hypothesis appears, which promises to connect them with previously established ideas. Thus, a paradigm shift can occur, and a scientific theory will appear that will replace the old one.

But the problem is this. Most people are wrong when they think they have groped for a paradigm-shifting idea. You never hear of these theories because they get disproved early on. There are far more such cases than well-known paradigm-shifting ideas

Einstein explained things in the theory of relativity that Newton could not explain. But to send a spacecraft to the Moon, and even to Mars, Newtonian mechanics is enough. We only need some refinements from the theory of relativity. Einstein enriched Newton's paradigm, and this is how it usually happens in science.

If at present there is a paradigm change, it consists in the fact that knowledge and information are transmitted in real time at the speed of light. Soon every person on the planet will have access to all world knowledge. This is an unprecedented precedent. There is also a downside to the coin: we look at the screen for eight hours a day, which negatively affects our vision, brain and personal life.

We talked about real and unreal things, but what can you say about hope? Basically, it's the belief that everything will be fine in the end. Is hope a useless illusion?

“I don’t think so at all. Hope is the projection of past experience into the future and the belief based on it that things can go on a good path. And that it is more likely to lead to our survival and prosperity, and not vice versa. For example, there is a lot of evidence of the moral progress of mankind: the abolition of slavery, the prohibition of torture, civil rights. At the same time, I am a realist and I believe that everything can roll back and we should make efforts to prevent this from happening. This is if you think at a collective level.

On a personal level, hope affects the way you interact with the world around you; this is a kind of fulfilling prophecy. If you are a pessimist, you will see the world more in a negative way, and ultimately your fears may become reality. It has been proven that people who consider themselves lucky are more sociable and open to new experiences. Therefore, with a greater degree of probability, something good happens to them, they open up more opportunities.

What about dreams? What's this? Flight of imagination, escape from reality or something more?

- An extremely interesting topic. I'll tell you right away: everyone needs to sleep eight hours a day. A significant part of this time is spent in REM sleep. If you wake up a person in this state, he will say that he was having a dream. Dreaming is a kind of wakefulness during sleep: the brain is mostly asleep, but part of it is very active. In general, there are several types of dreams. The first is a repetition of the events of the past day. This type of dream scrolls through events and they are recorded in long-term memory.

And finally, there are dreams related to what worries us. For example, we are trying to escape from danger, but we cannot, because we are moving very slowly. Or we come to work or study naked or without homework, we just can't find something. This is a reflection of our concerns in the real world

The thoughts you fall asleep with affect your dreams. There is an idea about lucid dreaming. Some people claim that they manage to control their dreams and they see something predetermined.

In the 1980s, psychologist Thomas Landauer calculated that the human brain is capable of storing only 1 GB of knowledge. And when making a decision or forming a point of view, we are forced to rely on the opinions of other people, who are also based on the judgments of others. It turns out that if we cannot figure out something, then we inevitably fall into the trap of other people's wrong views?

- The research you are talking about is connected with the myth that we only use the brain by 10% and that it is capable of storing a certain, limited amount of information.

And how much do we use?

- As the MRI scan shows, solving a certain problem causes blood to move from one area to another, but we use the whole brain. However, in a broader sense, you are right: humans have limited processing speed and total memory capacity. We do not know what it is, as this area has not been fully explored.

One of the theories about how humans came to dominate the planetary scale is related to our ability to exchange information: initially only orally, then in writing. We got an advantage over the rest of the species, no matter how developed their minds. Before the advent of writing, elders acted as custodians of the collective memory of their community, which was passed down from generation to generation.

We now have technologies for storing and processing additional amounts of information outside of our brain. This is called "expanded mind", one example is a mobile phone. Your relatives and friends, our society as a whole, the entire set of media and the Internet are additional resources for storing and processing information.